The Journalist and the Murderer Read Online Free Page A

current trial for murder.” The letter’s third paragraph, where Segal’s emendation took place, originally read:
    I realize, of course, that you do not propose to libel me. Nevertheless, in order that you may feel free to write the book in any manner that you may deem best, I agree that I will not make or assert against you, the publisher, or its licensees or anyone else involved in the production or distribution of the book, any claim or demand whatsoever based on the ground that anything contained in the book defames me.
    Segal felt constrained to change the final period to a comma and to add these words: “provided that the essential integrity of my life story is maintained.” Eight years later, in the MacDonald-McGinniss suit, it became MacDonald’s contention that the “essential integrity” of his life story had not been maintained in McGinniss’s book, and that McGinniss was guilty of a kind of soul murder, for which it was necessary that he be brought to account. The federal judge assigned to the case, William Rea, also seemed to hear the Commendatore’s music wafting out of the complaint and, in his denial of McGinniss’s motion for summary judgment, to concur with the plaintiff’s moralistic view of the case.
    But all this was many years into the future. In the summer of 1979, MacDonald and McGinniss were Damon and Pythias. In common with many other subjects and writers, they clothed their complicated business together in the mantle of friendship—in this case, friendship of a particularly American cast, whose emblems of intimacy are watching sports on television, drinking beer,running, and classifying women according to looks. A few weeks after writing about MacDonald for the
Herald Examiner
, McGinniss gave up his guest column and flew to Raleigh to take up his insider’s post with the MacDonald defense; he moved into the Kappa Alpha fraternity house on the North Carolina State University campus, which Segal had rented for the summer, and there joined MacDonald, his mother, Segal, and the various lawyers, paralegals, law students, and volunteers of the defense group. One member of this group was Michael Malley, a lawyer, who had been MacDonald’s roommate at Princeton and had taken part in MacDonald’s defense at the Army hearing that dismissed the charges against him in 1970. Now, on leave from his law firm in Phoenix, Malley had once again put himself at the service of his friend, and, alone of the group, was not happy about the insertion of McGinniss into its midst. As Malley was to testify later, he had nothing against McGinniss personally—indeed, he liked him, as everyone else did—but he felt there was something fundamentally risky about letting a writer into the inner councils of the defense. “I felt that if Joe was there all the time, we had a real problem about the attorney-client privilege,” Malley said, adding, by way of explanation, “The privilege is that anything you say to your attorney isn’t going to go beyond the attorney unless the client agrees to it. But if there is an outsider present, somebody who doesn’t belong to the defense team, the privilege is waived. And Joe, to me, clearly seemed to be an outsider, and I simply didn’t like it.” Malley told Segal of his concern about McGinniss, and Segal came up with a solution to the problem of the attorney-client privilege which Malley reluctantly accepted: McGinniss would be made an official member of the defense team—he wouldsign an employment agreement with Segal—and would thus be protected against, for example, any attempt by the prosecution to get at the defense’s secrets by subpoenaing his notes.
    The criminal trial in Raleigh lasted seven weeks and ended, on August 29, with MacDonald’s conviction—to the shock and horror of the defense. McGinniss, on hearing the verdict, cried, as did everyone else in the defense group. MacDonald was put in handcuffs and taken to a federal prison in Butner, North